News

Firefox 1.5 Work started on making sMArTH work with Firefox 1.5.2006-02-01

sMArTH-0.05.02 Minor bugs fixed.2005-04-22

sMArTH-0.05.01 Many bugs from the original release fixed. 2005-01-21

sMArTH-0.05 The first public release of sMArTH. 2005-01-14

About sMArTH

sMArTH is an online equation editor for MathML and LaTeX that is built on open Web standards. The editor itself uses a SVG interface and the application logic is implemented in ECMAScript using the DOM. Both MathML and LaTeX are supported as exporting formats in addition to the SVG format. The most important mathematical content from both LaTeX and MathML is already provided. The graphical user interface allows even the most complex equations to be built with simple 'Point and Click' techniques instead of writing convoluted typesetting code.

Requirements

You will need a SVG Viewer and a Unicode Font to be able to run sMArTH properly. Because it is a web application based on a collection of open standards it is not tied to one particular implementation, vendor or authoring tool. However, because not all standards we employ are in widespread use at this time, we recommend you the tools that work best with our application:

Although sMArTH is a Web application you can also run it on your own machine. However, in order for this to work you will need to access it through a Web server with support for PHP. We recommend you the well-known open source Apache HTTP Server. If you are using Apache HTTP, once you have transferred sMArTH to your local machine you will only need to extract it to your htdocs directory and than access http://localhost/sMArTH.svg. If you try to run sMArTH locally but this prerequisite is not fulfilled you will not be able to save your equations.

Project status

sMArTH was written mostly during a couple of weeks, when we were still undergraduate. The lack of experience is clearly visible in a few key wrong design decisions, which make the editor good only for creating small equations. A complete redesign is needed in order to make it scalable, easy to use and integrate in other platforms, and easy to provide small incremental fixes from outside contributors. But, due to lack of time (we are all busy with our PhDs, and the main developer is also busy with another project), sMArTH is currently on hold.

In early 2005, the browser support for SVG was still mostly nonexistent, with the (now discontinued) Adobe SVG plugin the only real SVG viewer, so this was the only target platform. Now, almost 4 years later, Opera 9.5 surpassed ASV in terms of implemented features, Firefox 3 and WebKit (and all the browsers based on it) support almost anything except declarative animation (which is on its way), and a new plugin for IE, Renesis, was developed. Clearly, the target platform was changed from a vendor-specific plugin used inside the most hated browser, to a standards based environment. Also, on the javascript side, with the bloom of AJAX and RIA, several strong platforms have emerged, thus making development a lot easier. The next version of sMArTH will be based on one of these platforms (prototype, most likely).

Still, this is our dearest project, and we really want to turn it into a usable editor in the (near?) future.